Apart from being a big money contest, this is an exciting subject since Social Networking has taken all our collective lives by storm. Something tells me that ideas given here would indeed impact G+, who knows who DS really is 😉

I’d like to start of my BEST Plan for G+ with a repost/recap of ideas I gave in Part 1 of the contest. I actually juiced out my brain completely in that contest and so it would be really tough to look for unexplored ideas in this Sequel Part 2 contest. Of course new developments have taken place in the world of SNS and G+, besides so many people have put up so many wonderful ideas in this new contest that one is bound to get more ideas by going on tangents to what others have proposed.

Below I will recap my Part 1 ideas and then write my own ideas for Part 2, after that I will go through all that people have submitted in this contest and hopefully get newer ideas from those submitted ideas too. I will give my conclusion and a short list of the most important actions G+ should take in the end. Any ideas that are too good to publicly state here will be redacted and PMed to DS.

Basically the below image taken from the Chrome Comic Book explains the reason why G+ will succeed:

Ranks of Users worldwide by influence. G+ list should one day be held as highly in regard as Times 100 Powerful

Virtual Avatars (using Evolver 3D Models) in a 3D Hangout

AdSense payments for the best most influential +1ers

Yahoo Answers disappoints 90% of the time. Either buy it and make it better or make a better G+ Experts.

G+ Paparazzi, the “exclusive” mini-site for celebs, the Twitter-Killer, whenever a celeb name is searched on Google G+ Paparazzi is the first site listed guaranteed.

The seasonal and occasional art seen on Google.com should be used much more extensively on G+

No Advertising on G+, not even small text-ads. Only purchased advertising. A revolutionary model that I have suggested.

New domain extension .go

Never scare users by showing the “Allow Access” button, always use G+ Connect

Put Play buttons even on GIFs

Integrate Prizes.org, launch big-money prizes for the best new Apps that can be used on Android as well as G+

Work and play modes for G+, G+ Enterprise the only SNS legally allowed in offices

Rank various circles by the amount of influence they collectively are exerting on the populace. Make the top circles look prestigious.

List download links for everything, it is not illegal. The person who does the download is the criminal along with the person who stores the illegal data on a server. Not the site which lists the download link. Also give option to Donate directly to Artists & Directors.

G+ free for life on all mobile providers, give them revenue generated from G+ use on their network

G+ Activism Central, no need to go to any petition site, it’s all here

G+ Hackathon, $10 Million prize to anyone who can hack a user’s data due to a fault of Google.

G+ People Search for free, Google uses all its assets to build a database for every person alive

Google Market, forget ebay, use G+ to buy from near and dear ones (another brand Zaarly who launched a contest of Prizes is the exact same model I suggested)

Gimmicky, but beam all G+ public updates into space

Voice-command sorting of contacts into circles

“Listening to” G+ music plugins for all popular music players

G+ Consumer Ops, spiders latch on to public discussions as well as private ones with permission, regarding products, and presents that data to companies as market research

G+ QR code ads on World Events like Football World Cup and Olympics for info on Athletes

Cash-back of publicly shared product reviews after genuine purchase

Virtual Gifts complemented by Real World Rose Delivery Service tie-up

Simpler Captchas (YouTube Captchas are illegible)

Multi-profiles switchable at will

Innovative Brand Sponsorship Deals instead of Ads

Hire influencers to promote +1 on the top 10% influences sites

Maps view alongside posts to see the extend of the share of that post visually on a map

TimeShift Mode to go back in time and read historical news as it happened one by one.

+1 on text to be recognised as +1 button clicked

The option to segregate posts into +++1 or ++1 or +1 according to importance

G+ Limited Site optional UI switch, show the old FB like site

Automatic Circle Detection when typing new posts or shares in the update box

DS, I’m keeping this essay below in absolutely proper grammar so that you need not struggle with rewriting it into proper sentences when presenting these to the Google folks. I’m going to be honest and say that I am hoping to win. I have kept away from suggesting tiny feature improvements like I did in Part 1, these improvements will keep happening all the time and G+ knows them better than us. What I have tried this time is to include the big picture and give overall ideas for making G+ number 1. Because it is Google’s baby and it ought to be the best.

My Part 1 Ideas

Needed to make way for the Most Important Idea to Transform G+. Your post about being positive about Google rather than being negative about FB got me thinking. Also the mention of the phrase “Google has everything” ignited a new thought, even though that fact that Google has a lot is already well established. So in order to provide an unbeatable reason for people to regularly use G+, Google simply needs to integrate Gmail into G+. Or vice vera. Not the way that Buzz by was integrated (as another “folder” link in Gmail) but rather by giving speed to the people for switching between G+ and Gmail (and the 100s of other Google services). The simplest way would be Tabs. But that has been done a lot, so graphic buttons on the side of G+ would be better. Also, if i type a person’s email or name in the To field of Gmail and an email it sent it should display in that person’s G+ feed. If i write in the To field “local friends” the message should go to the G+ feeds of all those listed in my “local friends” circle on G+. Google must integrate a mini Gmail into G+ that has the same buttons and graphics as G+ instead of the current Compose, reply, forward, etc. buttons on Gmail. So Gmail will exist as it is, coz it would be insanely stupid to change something that billions use. Adding a mini Gmail or +mail would be easier.So basically if i log onto to G+ or plus.google.com (or even better simply me.google.com) then i will get to see the following things on the page: 1) A Google Search Bar of www.google.com 2) My G+ profile under it 3) Buttons of all Google Apps that I use – Maps, Android, Prizes, Blogger, and whatever else I want to add and customise. iGoogle has been discontinued and rightly so, it was ugly, the utilities and apps on it were a joke, too many, and hardly ever used. The emphasis should be on showing one main App (G+ or Gmail or Google Search or Maps) and the rest are buttons on the side. The best thing Google can do is add Voice function so if people simply say “Switch to Gmail” the page will shift and morph into Gmail without opening a new page or drastically changing or appearing to be a page load. It will simply “transform”. Switch to Maps – Location Wall Street, I see the Wall Street map. Voice is not necessary but most people have laptops or tablets, and even desktops are wired to microphones. Thus the idea is that I should never need to open a second tab or window to access all that Google has to offer. My Single “Google Account”.

The most important idea that Google needs to apply in order to make G+ the default SNS of the world is to use my “Transform” idea. The idea is that moving from Gmail to G+ to Maps+ to any other Google service should not involve loading up of a new page or a tab or even refreshing of the page (i.e. page goes white and then new page loads). Shifting from one service to another needs to be done by transforming and morphing the page elements, just like the Transformers robots work. Google anyway has implemented a common design across all of its services, but one gets to note this only on close inspection. If Google puts my Transform page idea into practise then it will be immediately visible to all users how common the UI and interface for all Google services has become. I would love to do all my browsing in a single page of a single tab of a single window. This idea WILL transform G+ into the number 1 SNS, I am certain of it. Once Google puts a file called “Google.exe” up for download, it will become the most downloaded setup file ever.

The biggest idea to instantly get people to start using G+ “Google needs to give away free domain name registrations, i.e. www.karanbhatia.com or www.firstnamelastname.com which opens to the person’s G+ page – their website!

Just what the hell does FB make money through? Who clicks on FB ads? No one, what does FB have? Only FB. What does Google have? Everything. The Connect with FB feature will only make FB lamer since more and more spam will start showing up on the feed. G+ is going the right way by hardly showing any ads, and if any, then they are going to be showing their standard Google text ads. What they can do is use the same logic used to suggest friends to suggest brands and ads. I.e. show me only those brands and ads which I would consider “friending”. And show me TV spots of that instead of text ads. Maybe 5 second short TV spots to get attention, further 10 seconds if rollover and full 30 if click. So ads would have to be made such that their story could be told in 5, 15 as well as 30 seconds.

Plus the thing is, since we already entrust our info to Gmail and other Google Services, we should have no qualms about letting G+ invade our privacy. But EVERYONE thinks twice about the safety of their personal info on Facebook. To popularise G+, Google needs to make sharing easier. How about tie ups with phone manufacturers to add the +1 button on the phones. People still don’t get the whole idea of +1, it comes from the forums, every expert on a forum is +1 rep increase hungry, soon more people will be. +1 should benefit people monetarily just like hits on a YouTube video bring in cash. People will be encouraged to say more things that will be appreciated, rather than post louse I had blah blah for lunch messages. Why not, if someone is among the most popular sharers on G+ and their posts get lots of +1s then they should be paid either in cash or other rewards such as prizes.org coupons or talk time or gifts.

If I were the CEO of G+, in charge of creating a massive growth spurt – I would launch a worldwide epic TV spot – that makes it clear that G+You is all you need – that’s what the campaign will be named “G+You” it would simply tell that Google and its host of services is all you will ever need to manage your digital life. G+ should add a “create free website” tool that really packs a punch. Of course G+ won’t and shouldn’t go the Twitter way of Background customisation – it’s lame, just a different background does not provide you a unique identity you need the whole shebang of controls – logo, menu, text, pictures, animations, interactions, to be designed in order to have a cool site – Google should offer a “proper” website building tool and then all the aspects of the site would be integrated with different Google services.

What people need to say to others “I’m on G+, don’t use FB much now”. It will be sweet revenge for Google. And to do this they simply need to allow people to use Gmail with G+ in a more fused manner. Eventually people will shift their daily SNS routine to G+, first in drops, then in waves, then in droves, it will be an exponential growth. Simply remove the need for people to type in mail.google.com and plus.google.com, allow them to go to me.google.com where they get both and more.

Well a really bold move on part of Google would be to convert all @gmail.com and other @somethingsomething.com emails or User IDs of Google Services to @google.com. Currently only Google employees have email IDs ending with @google.com, why not let users also feel like being a bigger part of the company by simply giving them a single point user id/email/online id – @google.com, I would love it if my email id was karanjbhatia@google.com instead of karanjbhatia@gmail.com

Well you asked for a Core Philosophy/Idea – the basic problem that people just can’t seem to remember all their various passwords and user IDs should be it. God knows the number of times I have to use “forgot password” even “forgot user id”. I know there are systems like open id and other sites/apps that help you login, and now FB has jumped into the pool with FB connect. But still the problem is not fully solved, why can’t I use all my favourite sites and apps on smartphones/tablets with just one ID – make your Google ID your digital fingerprint, one ID for it all. When Coke and Pepsi were at war in the dissing ad campaigns in India, Coke did a very smart thing, it used a locally bought brand Thumbs Up to diss Pepsi instead of using Coca Cola. So G+ need not be handed the guns, Larry and Sergey should just ensure that people do not need to remember any other ID/email/password other than the one they use on Google for 99 percent of the sites.

Imagine if G+ can one day reach schools and teachers award +1s to students just like Hogwarts awarded “points for Gryffindor” and students +1d teachers for good classes. Well why “one day”, can they do this today? If yes then G+ will be invincible.

Let FB go ahead with FB Connect, people are sceptical of using it because they are afraid that the site they are logging on using FB Connect will post something on their profile without their knowledge. Google should take the opposite direction – merge sites into G+ instead of offering just the login info – turn all the important sites into G+ sub-brands so that FB has no decent place where to use FB Connect.

G+ needs to do a little PR stunt or create some funny ass viral ads (like the one with Mark Zuckerberg look-alike sitting at the bar, next to him MySpace founder is drunk who curses “if I ever find the creator of FB I will kill him, 5 years ago I was on top, then they said “FB is the new MySpace”, MZ introduces himself then he catches MZ by collar and says “haven’t you heard, FB is the new MySpace”. Meaning it is also now going to die like MySpace died.
The viral ads that Google creates should focus on “Wasn’t FB going to become a paid site? Well….what happened to that plan?”. Now with G+ in the market FB will never date charge 1 cent.

The way on FB and Twitter, new updates, shares and status messages from contacts come with “4 minutes ago” and “1 hour ago”. Instead Google can show “.0234 seconds ago” or “3 milliseconds ago” because they actually have the capability to transfer data that fast. Google anyway is positioning all its products on the USP of “Speed” – like 1) Chrome – “Chrome Fast”, 2) Android Faster and Faster upgraded versions 3) Google search is fast and the predicted search is even faster 4) Gmail has the fastest email response I think. So speed wouldn’t be a bad platform on which to try some gimmicky messages and guerrilla advertising like this.

Dating apps, hot or not, etc. are what have absolutely demolished Hi5 and Orkut and are also affecting Facebook. How about a different idea – when a guy and a girl becomes a couple, they can “merge” their profile! if they later break up it would also be possible to revert back to 2 individual profiles. This feature would be called “Move In”. Because logically if you have someone as a Girlfriend or Wife then all that they do and share on an SNS should be comfortable for you. A whole new way of being “one” – having one fused in profile!

Give me an option, a check box, to prevent people from adding me to their circles. I don’t want to know if XYZ random has added me to their circle, fine then I can stop receiving notifications, but XYZ can still add me to their circles, I don’t want to be seen in XYZ random person’s profile under their circles list. People have just come out of the Facebook era and when they receive a message saying “XYZ has added you to their circles, add them to your circles or block them” it equates to “You are now friends with XYZ”. XYZ who? WTF! I know and most people know, that if someone adds you to their circle it doesn’t make one bit of difference to your privacy until you add them to yours, but WHY? Why allow this to happen? Unless Google has deliberately added this annoying functionality to use some psych ploy to tackle the Facebook mentality of adding people as friends, I think we need an option to prevent any random guy/girl from adding us to their circles.

Next idea, so Facebook added the little nifty icons which showed-off people’s status symbols below their status updates, right? You know those little blackberry and iPhone icons. Well kill those, only Android icons. Because only Android rules. Ah well gotta be inclusive, so then G+ needs its own style – instead of the icon of the device manufacturer/OS G+ can collect info about the device itself and show the profile picture of the person inset in the screen of the device – so if I sent a message to one of my circles using the G+ app on my tablet, it would show as my profile pic, a pic of Samsung Galaxy Tab with my profile pic in the screen, a mouse over the profile pic will give details about the device.

Instead of showing status updates why not show live people webcams (if people choose to show it) in the news stream. Because isn’t that what Social Networks should be aiming to do? Bring people closer face-to-face no matter where they are, instead of converting their thoughts and feelings into words and a particular format. This way by showing live web cams and partly recorded/deferred live (i.e. recorded just a little while ago) video messages in the friend stream, one can get closer to friends and family. This is how it could work – you check your stream, just 10 minutes ago your uncle left a video message on his G+ speaking about the game last night, you want to talk to him, you buzz the video message, he gets the buzz in his stream, if he is still online he joins you immediately, you guys talk, then other contacts in the “Family Circle” can see you two talking and can also join in so it becomes a group video chat. People not in the “Family Circle” do not see these live video conversations happening.

I gave this idea on my Facebook page last year – allow people to call a toll-free number and either put a voice status update or use the speech-to-text function and convert the voice message to text and post it on G+.

The suggestions bar on the right side of G+ can be made a lot more intelligent. Currently it shows only people who we might have conversed with on gChat or gMail and who have gPlus accounts. Instead, there should be at least 2 more tabs apart from this “existing contacts” tab – dating and similar. Dating is pretty straight forward, the suggestion list should show people of the opposite gender who have kept their relationship as single, who are nearby, and who share similar hobbies, likes and dislikes. The Similar tab on the other hand would suggest people who are similar to you in terms of thinking and field of work – they could become your business partners, team mates, employers or employees. GPlus would need to use an intelligent algorithm to auto-tag each person with words that are extracted from their posted activities. Mind you, it needs to go beyond the obvious, just because someone +1d something that I also +1d should not qualify them to be shown here. The suggestions shown here should be more “recommended urgent” rather than “suggestions”, i.e. the people shown there should be extremely close in thinking and likes and dislikes, work, etc. to make them worthy enough to add to your circles.

The icons next to the Google+ logo on the top navigation bar are not descriptive enough (yet), I’m sure I’m not the only one who needs to hover the mouse above them to see what they stand for. Maybe a year down the line when people are absolutely familiar with G+ and it becomes an even more iconic interface, then they can be used like they are now. But for the moment, it is absolutely necessary that there is identifier text under or on the buttons without the need to hover mouse, it saves many seconds and lots of hassle.

What makes FB very appealing for businesses and fan pages is the huge space it gives for adding long profile pages on the left side. That allows for good branding. So does Twitter, with their custom backgrounds. G+ should allow for custom colours and design elements for Fan Pages so that when ABC brand’s post shows up in my feed it would have their colours, logo, plus the entire Google Places info (maps, working hours, reviews, contact numbers). Actually I’m not sure if fan/brand pages exist right now on G+, I haven’t come across any, but they should, albeit not as brazenly and explicitly commercial as FB, FB is going down the drain because after the millions of likes people have done, all they see in their feeds are Ads, Brands, Ads, Sell, Buy, Discount, New…i.e. ADVERTISING!!!. They are being sold things instead of connecting with people which is why they came on FB in the first place. So G+ needs to keep it within limits but still allow it. G+ is already doing great by not allowing cheap ass mafia wars and other bullshit games.

Plus they have launched some good games, now how about some proper 3D games – I am talking about BF3, CounterStrike, MW3, or at least their stat display and server info, so friends can see you play online and join you. Google should go beyond just showing its own little flash casual games and encompass all games installed on the comp or on the cloud and connect it with G+.

Did I mention above that even without the big banners and custom colours, we still, definitely need a bigger profile picture. And since G+ is so inspired by the Forum phenomenon of using +1 rep, how about adding gif or flash animated profile pictures, just like those of the forum phenomenon. GIF profile pics will immediately differentiate G+ from FB. FB will copy it if G+ adopts no doubt. But adding this ability to put GIFs as your profile picture would convert many to G+ permanently.

Currently G+ profile ID’s are monstrously long – plus.google.com/252953248223423423, OMG how can anyone remember that! They need to make it simple like FB – facebook.com/userName; they can do it differently by doing it userNAMEplus.google.com, so my id should be kbx911plus.google.com. Or better still as I suggested later on – Google should just gift me a domain name, I will select whatever is available and that domain will permanently point only to my G+ page – like www.karanb911.com or whatever is available.

Drag and drop functionality – in all probability people using G+ also have the Google Toolbar or the Google Search Box on the top right corner of their browser. Whatever link, name, brand, noun, name, place, animal, thing, picture, video they encounter of G+ should have the capability of being drag-dropped into the Search box to do a custom Google Search, i.e. if you just saw a Steve Jobs (May He Rest in Peace, What A Gr8 GREAT Inventor) video, then if you drag drop it to the search box, you get to see additional resources, web pages, info about that video separately, and then below the separator you see the normal Google search results for Steve Jobs

Allow people to customise their G+ interface; I’d like to see a small section showing my gMail inbox.

A MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE: Play Pause Button on the G+ feed: Today surfing G+ or even FB for that matter is like watching a Movie, no one likes to rewind and forward to where they left off. They want RESUME function. Besides I’m sure the average user checks G+ dozens of times, and also there are many interruptions that force you to quickly close the page and lose track of what you were doing, who you were chatting with, which video you were admiring etc. The PAUSE button on the corner of the page will FREEZE your session, then 10 minutes later or whenever, when you come back, and hit the PLAY button, your session will continue as is, not 1 thing will be changed. This is a much better functionality, because when people check back their feeds after some time they browse for a long time until they can spot a feed that they had already gone over and then they continue reading all the new ones after that, let’s remove that hassle for them! Also just the way YouTube has added the auto-refresh feature where new comments are automatically displayed, G+ too needs to have auto-refresh of shares and posts and status updates without the need to press “load the latest 23 updates” that one is required to in FB at the moment. Also it would be cool to display a Stock-market Ticket type ticker that shows all the new incoming messages.

THESE ARE MY POST READING-OTHERS’-IDEAS IDEAS, i.e. IMPROVEMENTS, INSPIRATIONS, TRIGGERED IDEAS. Haven’t gone over these yet, will go through and hopefully get loads more ideas to suggest. This was a mistake on my part in Part 1; I did not bother to go through the entries of other people, which could have provided me with lots more new ideas. I am good at coming up with ideas but even better at baking already half-baked ideas of others. This time I am ensuring that I will read all the posts, get the complete picture of everyone’s thoughts and I am certain I will be able to generate many new ideas and improve the ideas of others. I will give credit where it is due and I will not copy anyone’s ideas as is. Which is why before I do that, I am listing all my ideas for Part 2 below, that I came up on my own, without reading anyone else’s ideas.

My Part 1 Ideas that I posted as comments under others’ ideas

1) I agree with your (makque)views mate, G+ needs to be the only site people need to visit, it needs to be http://www.google.com, i.e. Google is not just search anymore, Google can move the search to search.google.com, or instead they can move Gmail and G+ and all else to me.google.com for people who have a Google account. Integration needs to go beyond the top bar, which is revolutionary in itself, but it feels like yet another row of tabs.

2) On Joe Condor’s entry: on a digital wallet project for Intuit held on Napkin Labs, I had suggested that ISPs who also own a bank, phone manufacturing, retail services should simply give away free basic smartphones to every person who can use them. Google is THE company that actually has all this integrated – Google Checkout, Google Digital Wallet, maybe they can launch an ISP and start buying 4G and Broadband spectrum the world over. Ebay has PayPal and Skype. One of them is going to do it. I wish Google does it. If the politicians elected from my local constituency is on G+ and posts his every move and daily work on G+ which I can follow and know what is happening, then the whole world will immediately be Transformed. But how can Google ensure that each and every politician opens a G+ page as their official internet page. The days of having http://www.yourname.com are over, sure people have http://www.theirname.com pages but how many really use them? If a person is not in your contacts and visits your G+ page it should act like your public website – your http://www.yourname.com site, no offence to you DS, but even your site http://www.dickheadstupdsson.com is just lying there and not doing anything, wouldn’t you instead prefer that you can link the domain name http://www.dickheadstupidsson.com to your G+ profile and then customise it to look like whatever you want your website to look like, and those people, those strangers, those not in your contacts will see it just like they see your present website. While those in your contact list will see it to whatever level of info sharing you have set for them in their respective circle. yes SNS can act as a very effective unofficial voting system, like exit polls, they give a sense of what the people want. Of course the world should definitely move towards eGovernance officially, I should not get the opportunity to just vote every 5 years, but every week, every day, every month or as much or as little I want. There should be rewards for voting right and punishments for voting wrong, that will make people think harder about who they vote for and why.

3) On Ersin Erchin’s entry: Brazil and India were the only two countries where Orkut became famous, so yeah maybe it makes sense to put more emphasis there. But hey NEW IDEA! Google owns Orkut right, how about simply transferring all of Orkut to G+ with everything intact. Maybe make a sub-brand of G+, “The G+ Orkut”, it would be the same UI as G+ but just a little bit of difference to still make it seem like Orkut. Then slowly and seamlessly, start taking out the Orkut DNA and replacing it with the standard G+ DNA, in a year they would both be the same and no one would miss anything.

Ad campaign sure, even I suggested it, but then again…does Google really need to advertise? Unless it is some specific Campaign Message or Idea that you are suggesting, it is but obvious that Advertising can create hype, but like Vibhor said G+ took only 16 days to get where FB took 3 years. So there’s really no need for promotion and hype. What is needed is for a reason for people to mass migrate. That would only come by giving more than FB, more friends or better friends, not just ads. Also there is a risk, if G+ advertises in Mass Media, so will FB, ads are really conceptualised by paid Ad Agencies and Creatives, both can buy the best talent and get some really creative ads and get into a dissing game (like Apple vs. Microsoft ads) and there is a risk that FB with all the money they have been valued at can spend millions and get a better ad campaign (or maybe Mark Zuckerberg will hack the Ad Scripts from G+’s Ad Agency 😉 So traditional advertising, though necessary, is secondary. What is needed is something viral.

“Free” stuff for poor countries, what a joke. -1 million mate. You want G+ to “buy” users?

Your point about Families “migrating” after one or two shift is interesting. WHAT IF…G+ comes up with a “Green Card” campaign, whereby all your FB profile info will get transferred to G+ as is, just reformatted into the G+ format. After all it is not FB which owns the user info but the user itself. So FB cannot prevent G+ from “Migrating” users with all their profile info, videos, pictures, friends list, comments intact. They’ll fight a legal battle sure – but the bottom line is “I own my info, not Mark Zuckerberg” Buzz failed because it was just a news feed, people want to see pictures of their friends and how their friends are portraying themselves to the world. Even I originally thought that Google should launch a Road-blocker campaign across all media but then I changed my mind. My reasoning is above, if Google advertises so can Facebook, and who knows whose ad campaign would be the best – it would be the second big risk Google brings onto its brand. They have already taken a huge risk by launching G+ and it does not seem to be paying off. Now people are thinking…hmmm Google is not so powerful after all, if they were then G+ would not be so inactive. They took a risk but failed to put in revolutionary ideas. In G+ that is, the entire redesign they did of the bunch of Google services including the top bar is a revolutionary idea. Now I feel so much more comfortable in using all of Google services. Who uses Facebook mail? Google has Gmail. All they need to do is make it accessible from G+ so that people do not have to leave G+ in order to use Gmail. Using the Transform/Morph elements idea. The biggest trump card in Google’s hand is of course Google Search, Facebook does not have it and probably will never. When people realise that they can search the web, check their emails, check friends photos, videos, broadcast their thoughts, keep in constant touch with things they want to follow – from a single tab on a single page or better instead from a single flash-based window, they will not need FB or Twitter or anything else. The less they advertise, and the more they innovate, the better. Yes Google Chrome ads were shown in India too if I am not wrong (or did I see them on YouTube, I don’t really remember). Of course Google has tons of money to out-advertise even the biggest MNC FMCG for each and every day for decades. But I really think the world can do with less advertising, I have worked in ad agencies, and we….. the world should have less advertising.

4) Vibhor, loved your entry, especially your defence of India! Jai Hind! Your post gave birth to new ideas for me. What if G+ becomes like a Black Hole Star (but in a good way), sites are cropping up all over the world all the time, there are too many sites, maybe it is time to trim some of the excess fat – by merging them with Google – i.e. the site data, ownership, membership remains the same, only the design gets changed and the data is reformatted into a more organised manner (Google’s Mission is to “Organise the World’s Information”). I regularly visit various kinds of forums seeking troubleshooting solutions for all kinds of hardware and software and electronic bugs. It would be great if there were Super Forums for each topic on G+, so instead of going to one of the dozen android forums for my specific smartphone, I would just go to the G+ page for that, that page would draw in information from the dozen different sites, what I post on G+ will be visible to all Experts on all forums…something like that. Or maybe simple Takeovers, for example GalaxyTabForum will agree to handover the site to G+ for a lump sum amount, which would be significant, instead of the relatively smaller amounts it earns monthly through AdSense – the site will get integrated into G+. Slowly many other popular sites, forums, blogs etc. will get merged into G+, it would become as you said “A Social Utility” which I think is a very smart phrase you just invented – the evolution of Social Networking. From just looking at what others are doing and posting lame comments, you can actually get down to doing something with all the time spent, while also being there on the social platform. Your graphs are also helpful. They show that G+ did indeed get a turbo boost because of the hype and Gmail. Now accounts are registered but people are only lingering on G+, the bulk of their activity is still on FB, simply because all their friends are still on FB. Someone else said, and I too think the same, that G+ is a great opportunity to “start afresh” because the friend list on FB has become way too irrelevant and cluttered. Maybe the majority of people don’t even recognise the majority of their friends. Maybe G+ should start ranking friends by the level of your involvement, interaction with them – if I just added a person and said Happy Birthday to them once, they would be last, if I speak to someone, share or +1 them regularly then they should be first.

5) On Satyanarayan Raju’s entry: Job seekers already use LinkedIn. Google already provides free movies via its Box-office channel on YouTube, which Yahoo copied with Movieplex. All Google services are already integrated with the Top Bar Navigation now, you log into one and you’re logged into all. Games are not anticipated like Movies, so a week earlier on G+ won’t make any difference, not for casual games anyway. Live coverage of sports! TV channels pay millions/billions to do that, Google can’t give it for free, sure they showed the IPL Cricket Tournament on YouTube, but then again if this is done it will be YouTube not G+. Medicines are not social. Shopping, buy, sale, discount, spam is what is turning people off FB, G+ needs to stay away from them.

6) On Banarahu entry: One stop check it all, that’s right! And even more – it needs to be a One page, no extra window, no extra tab kinda one-stop for everything Google. Multitasking is fine, but a person can only look at one tab or one window at a time. So one page should be more than sufficient is switching between various services is just a matter of looking in the corner and clicking on the appropriate button. If I am on G+ and browsing through my friends posts, and I suddenly feel the urge to use Maps and check out a place, I will click on the maps icon in the corner and the news-feed I was watching will get paused exactly where I left it and the maps app will launch as the page transforms itself by shifting and squeezing items. Then when I am done with my 2 minutes maps look, I click back on the G+ icon and I resume exactly where I left, without leaving the page, clicking on another tab, or window, or alt-tabbing.

7) On Nitish Talekar’s entry: Instead of common chat rooms, how about Farm Ville type farms – except they would be called “Place”. 5 Friends are on G+. One of them just shared something exciting, 4 friends decided “hey lets visit Jimmy Place”, they will land in a common place where they can see each other’s Avatars and which is modified by Jimmy just the way he modifies his desk, or room or office. His music, his colours, his posts, his movies.

8) On Ravi’s entry: ahem….the +1 button is much more older than FB (it originated in Forums) and makes much more sense to share something rather than the “like button. For example, if I want to share with my friends a tragic news report of a bombing or government scam, then “Karan likes this” would be odd. But when on Google I +1 it simply means I have deemed it important enough for the attention of people I know. Whether I like or hate the subject in the share is apparent. The like button makes it look odd to post such shares and this is the reason it will eventually fail. Or maybe they will come up with a “dislike” or “hate” button. But G+ does not need to do any such thing. +1 for everything. Maybe they will come up with a -1 button later. But they don’t need to do it because “ABC likes this” over a picture of a fat politician seems odd. FB needs the extra buttons, G+ doesn’t.

9) On JLT Neto’s entry: If you meant that when a user clicks on an ad he/she gets some credit, then the idea is fail. But if you meant that each G+ profile should automatically get linked to a Google AdSense account and if your posts/shares/profile is well received and shared or +1d by a lot of people then you stand to win some of the money spent by the advertisers, then it is indeed a very interesting idea. But again that too will spoil the entire purpose of improving the quality of conversations, people will become button clicking drones if money is involved. Look how people spam YouTube accounts with messages begging people to subscribe to their channel.

10) On Wesley Lee’s entry: Great Idea Wesley! Yes I use Yahoo Answers a lot too, well actually the search strings I type in Google usually show Yahoo Answers pages as results. How weird! How come Google Experts is not launched yet. They tried Aardvark, an email expert finding and solution locating service but it Epic Failed. Your suggestion is good. A sort of Aardvark, except the questions and answers are carried forward and backward by your entire list of friends on all sites and different SNS but the origin and final point is G+. Brilliant! The Question will originate on G+, first seen by the “circle” with whom it has been shared. The link will get broadcast on twitter by the circle, and posted on FB by the circle, the contacts and followers of the circle will similarly either answer it or spread it forward. Then instantly the answers will directly be sent back to the G+ page where the question was asked and all submitted answers are listed. There a quick fire version of Prizes.org can run and answers can be ranked, and even monetary rewards or actual gifts (not virtual coins or roses and all that #$$@$). This would rock. The best people to ask a question is the people you know, they know you!

11) On Megan Young’s entry: Yes they can do that, G+ can have the like button and FB can have the +1 button. But they won’t – not right now anyway, not until everyone’s places have been established. Right now the big 3 are here to stay Twitter, FB and G+. Chatroulette came in big but got drowned because basically it was all anonymous. What is interesting to see is who will bow down first. Will FB allow the +1 button first or will Google allow the Like button first.

12) On A. C. Henderson’s entry: dating apps, hot or not, etc. are what have absolutely demolished Hi5 and Orkut and are also affecting Facebook. How about a different idea – when a guy and a girl becomes a couple, they can “merge” their profile! if they later break up it would also be possible to revert back to 2 individual profiles. This feature would be called “Move In”. Because logically if you have someone as a Girlfriend or Wife then all that they do and share on an SNS should be comfortable for you. A whole new way of being “one” – having one fused in profile!

13) On Henry Gutierrez’s entry: all noob points, except the one about celebrities. That is very important. I really wonder what it is about Twitter that draws all the celebrities of the world to only use Twitter when FB and G+ offers more ways. Maybe celebrities want to stay in touch with their fans yet keep a certain distance. Or maybe the nature of Twitter allows for things to go really viral and it helps hard-core fans to really track their idols easily. G+ certainly needs to get celebrities to start creating their “Fan Circles” but the Celebrities should be more like “Angelina Jolie” and “James Cameron” rather than “Paris Hilton” and “Kim Kardashian”, you know classy brainy people, not dumb@#$%

14) On Zedn Smida’s entry: hmmm not so good ideas, but then again here too, reading such entries results in some new thought. I just saw a Documentary on Russia Today, there were two polar opposites – one guy totally shunned all media and even cell phones to protect privacy, the other went ahead and broadcast every single detail. The 2nd guy’s logic “when everything about me is freely available, the bad guys can’t really misuse the info”. I think the day is not far when people will move around with 24/7 video broadcast from their cell phones, laptop webcams etc. And these live video streams will replace the text and image streams. Of course there will be times when they will pause their streams but most of their waking hours they will be freely available to be seen by their friends and vice versa. The limitation of “place” will simply vanish.

15) On Aranzueke’s entry: HEYYYYY I GOT A GREAT IDEA – PR STUNT, HEADLINES IN NEWSPAPERS ALL OVER THE WORLD, ACTUAL HEADLINES, not paid PR headlines, actual headlines because Google will actually do it. The headlines would be “Google attempts hostile Takeover of FB, offers .00000001 cent per share, values FB at 10,000 dollars”. Imagine the press this insult would generate! Google is so confident about G+ that it is valuing FB in the near future at only 10k when some supposedly-big financial firms have valued it in billions. Point taken, yes FB will never go extinct, it just will continue as a sidekick. 🙂 Just the way Orkut and MySpace and Friendster and Hi5 continue to breathe today. These almost extinct SNS are used by people who find shifting to FB or G+ too bothersome and who are not so tech-savvy or maybe for the same reason that people use FB – their friends are there on those sites. But once the news “Google integrated all Services into Single Page” is out, people will move and…..more importantly…Stay!

16) On Chip Hahn’s entry: That’s what I also thought. When G+ launched I thought, wow a chance to start afresh. FB list had been populated by too many fair-weathered friends and people of all kinds. The good thing about G+ is I can simply transfer any such people to a “Never Share circle” and never share with that circle.

17) +Paul McCourt (instead of @Paul McCourt) your idea of seasonal themes is great, Google already does this on a small scale on their logo on http://www.google.com for all notable important days and festivals. G+ will provide the artists who make these graphics at Google a bigger and more powerful canvas to express their art. It would also be well received I think. Facebook always looks the same whether it is Christmas or Diwali, G+ shouldn’t!

18) This should be interesting, look towards the left of the screen, 18 likes, 6 tweets, 7 inshares and only 4 +1s. This needs to change man. And another very important idea for G+, I know G+ is trying to establish their brand firmly in people’s mindspace, and maybe they already have what I am about to suggest planned. But instead of the icon showing “+1 in the colourful sticker and then the number of shares, i.e. 4 in this case” G+ should modify their share counter to just show the colourful sticker with the number +4 in it. That makes sense doesn’t it?

My Part 2 Ideas

1) Current Best Idea: 0% Advertising
Why? Because no one likes advertising. No one. Not one. No one.
And that is what FB is so full of and getting heavier day by day – advertising, branding, brand pages, like us and get this shit and that, surely people are getting pissed off at being sold things on a place where they want to hang out with their friends, enemies and frenemies.
Google can afford to run G+ without even requiring a dollar of advertising. Thus if I were the CEO of G+ I will make it the single most important selling point in all advertising and PR – that G+ has 0 Advertising. At present G+ shows no advertising and they should keep it this way and harp on this fact in all PR and discussions online. Slowly but surely it will get ingrained in people’s brains that FB is full of advertising while G+ is completely free of it. G+ can show an option to people to enable ads if they want to receive interest based ads, they already have the AdMob Mobile and Google Search interest based ads software ready.
But FB can’t go the 0% advertising way. It needs the shitty ads to earn revenue. It can’t compete with G+ when G+ is independent on advertising, even their little single search based ads that they show on Gmail. Think about it, why do you like Gmail over Ymail and Hotmail? Because Ymail and Hotmail screens are full of big banners advertising and are basically irritating you by decreasing your screen size because it is a free service. Well your service maybe free but the user is paying you back by investing their time with your brand. But Gmail just shows that one line of targeted search based keyword based ads. If they refrain from showing even that on G+, and make G+ completely advertising free, then people will start making the switch. First in trickles, then in droves, then in hordes. If FB tries to compete by switching off ads as well, it will go bust.

2) Okay so if I had 2-6 billions, and had to grow G+ by 100%, then…

I’d give free domain name registrations to everyone by mass purchasing 100 million domain names from a registrar. That would cost 1 billion.

Thus http://www.stacyjones.com would be Stacy Jones’ plus page – Stacy Jones’ personal URL which opens only G+ Profiles. Everyone would like to register their name in cyber space. But even if they have money they won’t because they don’t understand the complicated things associated with domain names like Domain Forwarding and many other settings like Nameserver etc. So every verified user gets to register a free for life domain name. Whichever Stacy jones takes the available http://www.stacyjones.com first gets it. Others will have to improvise like sjones, stacyj, sjbaby, etc. point is Google is giving free .com addresses and adding functionality to G+ to make it act as a personal website. Easy, free, fast, hassle-free.

Maybe just maybe, Google has enough money to launch a new kind of domain extension – .go

Their G+ .go profiles will open properly in all kinds of devices

3) The single most bothersome feature on FB is the “Allow access” button. One never knows what is going to happen if you click “Allow access”. Why do apps and pages need permission to post on my wall? This feature is completely untrustworthy and I am sure lots of people think thrice before clicking that. All these then show up as “apps” in the deep inside the FB profile settings to be forgotten for all eternity until the day the user comes back to explore the settings and looks at so many useless apps showing up with permission icons next to them. Half of these are not recognisable at all. This kind of functionality needs to be completely kept at bay from G+. When I go on a site it asks my login. It does not ask if it can post random stuff to my profile or wall or stream. That’s called being pushy and nosy poky. Mind your own business apps, you just need to know who I am so you can keep a record for me. You don’t need to write on my page. So if I can visit a site with just a login, same should be done for apps on G+. G+ would be the frame within which these 3rd party apps and mini sites will launch, they will not even need me to login since I am already logged in to G+ and they will not ask for any permission to post on my wall. Go find better ways to promote your products than forcefully posting your messages on my Wall!

4) This gives rise to a new idea – these days FB Connect and Twitter Connect and Google Connect are all fighting it out for the biggest market share. With my G+ master frame idea that problem will be completely resolved. Once logged into G+, all the G+ connect enabled sites that you visit will automatically log you in without bothering you with register or log in pages. They won’t need to show you FB Connect or Twitter Connect. It should lead to a day when you need to only remember your Google ID and secure password which acts as a login for all sites you might want to visit.

5) Been seeing this trend on G+ of heavy animated GIFs, is it there on Facebook as well? The problem is that G+ auto loads these heavy GIFs (one of them about morphed celeb faces was 7.5 MB!!) and dozens of these load simultaneously almost hogging all your bandwidth. Just try it yourself. Click on “what’s hot” on the G+ homepage (located on the left side near the bottom-centre). It should not be like this, there should be a play button which I can click to load any gif that I find interesting, otherwise it is just wasting a lot of bandwidth by auto loading all the heavy GIFs together. I haven’t ever seen the trend of animated gifs on FB, but have not really used FB for the past year or so. It benefits G+ in that there is something visual to see as you scroll down the feed, but if there are dozens of 7 MB Gifs it’ll impede the majority of the users, maybe G+ should give options to auto-load or not and even in auto-load, the images should load as one scrolls nearer to the entries. Off screen gifs should not auto-load wastefully. I just checked out a time-killing site called www.damnlol.com, some posts on it are indeed very lulzy, and many of them use the animated GIFs. Guess the reason these animated GIFs are trending on such humour and time-pass sites and also on G+ is that bandwidth has increased. Earlier only small GIFs were used online, now because of higher net speeds heavier GIFs are possible. Maybe they are more compatible on a higher range of devices than flash or movie players. So that’s the reason these GIFs are tending I think. But after going through that www.damnlol.com site I am a fan of these GIFs, I won’t mind them showing up on my G+ stream, some are really funny and share-worthy.

6) Ok let me start again from scratch, what is it that this mysterious character DS is looking for? He says he want ideas on how to grow G+ exponentially to close to 250 million registered users, most of whom should use the site regularly and not just register and be idle or use other services. Also think about how 2-6 billion can be spent in achieving the above goal. People should come to G+ and stay on, spend time and become hard core G+ users.

If suppose the condition was that all 5 billion need to be spent at one go on a single item – then I would use that much money to get 5,000,000,000/25=200,000,000 G+ tablets, that only run G+ and selected G+ android apps along with a free for life 64 kbps connection. That’s 200 million G+ tablets. Every poor but talented student in the world (demonstrated by an IQ test) will get one. Plus, kids of well-to-do parents would be asked to also purchase one for their kids at $50, because it would be a Buy 1 Give 1 deal, Buy 1 Tablet at $50 (real value $25) so that 1 more tablet can be given to a poor child, but that way the Child and the Parent would be able to choose who to give that Free tablet to. Maybe it’s the son or daughter of their car-driver, or washer, or janitor, or school bus driver, whoever! This would spread a wave of goodwill for Google around the world unlike anything ever witnessed in the history of the world….ever. Every single talented child in the world will have the power of the information age in their hands.

Well that’s a big IF of course, IF Google has that kind of money to spend, and IF this is more than just a hypothetical question. Also who knows how it would impact Google and G+. Maybe it would do better than anything else G+ can ever do to improve its user base. Maybe it won’t really make a dent. At the least though, 200 million poor students from middle-school to university the world over will be armed for a better future.

But if the 5 billion were the entire budget for the G+ domination exercise and something other than the above philanthropy idea was required, then….

a) I’ve already mentioned the idea about Google purchasing 250 million domain names en masse or itself becoming a Domain Registrar and giving domains to every user for free (the domain name can only open to their G+ profile and it is locked down)

b) Go on an M&A spree. Buy promising social network start-ups and integrate them into the G+ fold. Imagine G+ launching 3 years ago and buying out Twitter when it was just launched. Twitter is not the last great SNS idea, there are million more to come. G+ should hire an army of Tech Gurus who will scour cyberspace and the IT parks to locate talent that has the right idea for the next big SNS like Twitter. All the acquired ideas will get merged into the new G+ look and format, becoming Google ____ (something something)

c) Launch contests on all Programming and Coding Crowdsourcing sites to develop the next big app.

d) Keep a booty aside for the next 3 years to give $100 every week to the post that receives the most +1s from every country.

e) Take Prizes.org big and make it a tab on G+. Let people earn money by submitting solutions. Users will post contests, inviting ideas. But G+ will set the prize amount and judge the winners. So no chance of any scam then, unlike how it happened here on Prizes when $100 coupons were given away to people.

f) Let’s take the free domain name idea forward. Google can use this mammoth budget to buy more server farms. These servers will provide free hosting space the likes of which have never been witnessed before. Basically all other server hosts will get wiped off because why will anyone pay for site hosting when G+ is giving it for free. The only catch would be that to be a user of that site you would need to login using your Google ID and a G+ component will be added to a small space on the site. No matter how big your site is you can host it for free as long as you have a G+ id. Currently free hosting sites have limitations on how many Gigs your site can be and they put all kinds of ads.

7) hmmmm….im really juiced out for ideas, I gave it my all in Part 1 and so now it is difficult to look for any unexplored areas. I will pause this section for the moment and post this on a blog. I’ll proceed to reading everyone else’s ideas and hope that it will give birth to newer original ideas and I will post those in the section below.

My Part 2 Ideas after reading Others’ Entries:

1) Try simplifying the meaning of Circles for a lot of people. Make posting a status update more like writing and email – you open “compose mail” and then type in a few email ids, write a subject, write the message and send – the same logic should apply to G+. Type a status update and then easily either drag and drop the circles you want to share the message with or type in email ids or names individually (with auto-complete of course). Inversely. Test out how Gmail can be used directly in the current format of G+ with minor or almost no changes. I mean I shouldn’t have to open mail.google.com at all to check my inbox, the “stream” on G+ would automatically show me the incoming emails as well as posts shared on G+ by those who are in my circle. I should also then be able to reply to them simply by clicking a reply button like in an email. Basically the “stream” that G+ shows would be so smart that it is able to judge and predict what should be shown first to me – if it is an email marked important by me it will show up first before any other share sent towards me by some random person who added me to their circle. For this purpose there should be “modes” in G+. When I click on “Work” mode I will get more work related emails and G+ shares related to work. When I am in “Play” or “Leisure mode” no work-related email will be shown to me except if I choose to see it by clicking “show all” incoming emails. G+ should become so comprehensive that no one in their right mind would keep any other home page apart from G+. When I launch my browser, G+ opens, I can easily choose from the page whether to do a “Google search” or write a word file, or check my email, or browse Picasa photo albums, or play a game. Everything is there on that one page and things load ultra-fast (that is the prime USP of Google) without refreshing the page. For this to happen, again my Transform Idea of the previous contest will have to apply. Maybe it can be an Adobe Air app, flash app. But it should be such that even on an old black and white phone with GPRS, G+ would still be able to work.

2) G+ needs to make strong use of Voice. The way the eye-candy features in an Enterprise Android Tablet like Avaya are shown, the same should be made available on G+. You open G+, you see your friend online, you want to talk, just click and a call goes through. Or choose to send a voice message, do a video chat or send a video message, text chat or send an email. It should be very easy. There should also be a feature of “TV” where you can watch videos together and see each other’s web cams side by side so as to make it feel more like sitting and watching something together. There is already a Party feature on YouTube if I am not wrong, that allows friends to browse videos simultaneously from various locations, just add a side-by-side web cam to it.

3) Integrate a real-life version of Sims (but not as sleazy as Second Life) into the G+ tabs, where one can meet all their online contacts just like in the Sims game.

4) Rank Circles into “power”. To be eligible to participate in the “Power Circle” rankings, a circle of people would have to have all other members of the circle added to their Circle – meaning everyone has everyone else in that special circle “New York Nicks Lovers Circle” basically a new age Google Group. Whichever circle has more prestige will get ranked. Prestige will be calculated by how many people are talking about and +1d that circle’s shares.

5) Like Rachel said (in a wishful thinking manner) “Just offer Music”. Well it can’t be done the straightway but there is a lot of weight in Music. iPad, iPhone, iPod and the current resurgence of Apple probably has a lot to do with MP3. Why should Google not take benefit of it. Why should only the smart users who know how to use “/index of” and proper search strings such as “.mp3 MB VBR” get to download songs. Google can do these searches on their behalf by adding these search strings to the name of the artist, song or album that any G+ grandma wants to download. G+ cannot store songs, but it can definitely show up working links (voted by the community as “Broken Link” or “Works”). Next to these “illegal” music download links, Google should also show legal iTunes and Spotify and other links. Next to both these links Google should show a simply one-click, enter amount, send money link to Donate money directly to the Artist by passing the Music Label completely. The user can illegally download the music from the links but then donate money to the Artist, whatever they can afford and spare. In return the Artist will provide gratitude and gift legal tracks to whatever extent he can buy-back from the Music Labels!

6) I’m sure plugins already exist that allow you to post at one place and have it shared at all SNS at the same time. I.e. if you tweet, the tweet also goes on FB. Google should just get some app developer to make an app that posts a G+ share on Twitter as well as FB (even if Twitter and FB make every effort to block such an app) and all replies get diverted back to G+.

7) I was aghast at seeing Mobile Service Providers in India advertise monthly and daily rates for using Facebook and Twitter. G+ should go the free-way by giving the Mobile Services providers a part of income from whatever is earned by way of advertising by the usage incurred on their network. Once customers realise that it costs nothing to use G+ on their mobile they will not use the paid FB and Twitter services.

8) G+ needs to hire more human moderators to provide real-time support and chat. FB has no Contact Us whatsoever. If I have some concerns I cannot communicate with FB at all. It would cost a lot of money but those human moderators can also help point people towards the information they are looking for apart from support roles.

9) G+ needs to become the activism central. Any issue that bothers you, you can freely discuss it on G+, you can get petitions signed. Once a petition receives a significant number of signatures G+ will spend their own resources in getting it delivered the respective ministries or departments or officers.

10) G+ needs to hire 1000 of the world strongest white-hat hackers and security experts and launch a $100 million contest to any hacker who can hack into the data of G+. An open challenge like this will get lots of PR in media and will prove a point about the safety of their personal data to all users.

11) I think more than “being part of something large” the thing that draws people to FB is that you can “search” for anyone you know, knew or want to know and in all probability find them. Google is the master of search. Google should revolutionize people search in such a way that even if someone does not have a G+ or even Google account their details will still show up. Right now if you want to locate a long lost friend in some foreign country you land up on these shady sites that ask for your credit card number. Google has enough resources to build its own database, or buy some of these companies, and offer the world’s best People Search for free.

12) Hmmm, almost everyone wants a one stop shop. Before G+, the only thing Google was missing was a proper SNS, it had Buzz and Wave sure but they were not really well known. But everyone wants a one stop shop, with every entry read I get more and more sure that the Transform Idea is the best thing that G+ can and should do. One page that simply shifts its elements without reloading to form a completely different G+ service without logging out or requiring log in. Seamlessly and quickly.

13) Integrate all Android Apps into free PC-MAC-Linux versions to be used on a desktop/laptop/tablet/phone when using G+ through a browser. Basically this means that even Mac users will be able to use Android apps if they open G+ on the Safari browser on an iPad. I was thrilled to find the exact version of Angry Birds on Chrome that I used on the Android Tablet. Now with every single Android App available on the G+ through a browser, Just imagine! G+ should seriously push the Android Apps as the only proper way of using Apps. The biggest fail of FB has been the 100000000000s of shady, use and throw apps that are cluttered on it. I have not used 99% of the apps on FB a second time. Fail! G+ will show the apps just the way they are shown on a tablet/smartphone screen on the Apps tab.

14) Auto-circles, with a combination of smart AI combined with Human Moderators, one at a time, every single user of G+ should be given suggestions for additional circles. For example I have joined G+ and made a few circles – “local friends”, “international friends”, “work”, “family” etc. Now G+ suggests to me “local e-

15) governance circle”, “advertising creatives’ circle”, “Crowdsourcing circle” based on whatever I have been doing and spending time on, using G+. Ultimately G+ should aim to become the world’s smartest news-stream – news that I want, friends that I care about, topics that are important to me, listed at the right time, so as to reduce information that passes away like a ship in the night. If there was a local filmmaking workshop and missed seeing it’s ads or knowing about it because I am not a regular on XYZ forum for filmmakers is not okay. G+ should know, should smartly integrate all the Google Services and let me know because I ought to know.

17) I think you have a good point here, to tackle Twitter and LinkedIn, G+ should have specialised sub brands – Google Paparazzi and Google Careers. G+ original itself would take the role tackling Facebook (no it is not just for teens). G+ Paparazzi would be the chosen place for celebs, politicians, important public figures. It will be exclusive. You can get a G+ Paparazzi account only if you are “someone”. And once you get a G+ Paparazzi account you can consider that you have “arrived”, like owning a corner office or a Ferrari. Yup that would work. Google Careers would have to outdo LinkedIn, or simply purchase it (because LinkedIn is considerably smaller than the pie that is at stake between G+ and FB, whatever the asking price, LinkedIn must be acquired or a better alternative built super-fast at huge cost. Whatever Google chooses, the Google Careers page would allow a person to start-afresh after their LinkedIn experience. Yup, yup, yup, this would work.

20) Better than ebay, I want a product I either search for it on the G+ search box and it lists the product and the nearest sellers, it also lists the 2nd hand sales from all my circles and extended circles and circles of circles. Because it is always better to buy from someone you know. Google Market will be a place where you can browse for whatever you want to buy. The difference between this and eBay would be that Google Market will show you the list of people in your address book or extended circles who are selling it or have bought it or are related to the company selling the product or who have 2nd hand items of the same on sale first and then the other normal merchant listings.

21) Just as a gimmick, make G+ the only SNS that broadcasts all streams of data LIVE into space 24×7. Meaning your data would get transmitted to outer space. Just a gimmick but it would be kind of a special feeling that my thought, post, share or idea posted on G+ has instantly been put on its way to light years away!

22) Voice command for doing the circle sorting. For some reason sorting contacts into circles is very tedious. The drag and drop seems to be a very boring thing to do. How about Google permanently display a notification message “Sorting Hat Pending” on the corner of G+ until the user clicks on it and completes the action. Once clicked the page will list all the friends in order and one by one bring their pictures and name to the forefront. The user only needs to say out the name of the circle aloud – work, family, friends, gaming, etc. And the person instantly gets added to that circle. Believe me, just to see how well voice commands work, people will try this out. And it will work for 99% of the people since here Google only needs to recognise some 10-15 types of words plus some 3-4 custom circles that people might create, a relatively easy task.

23) Tie-up with all popular music players – Winamp, WMP, VLC or whatever that people use, including mobile players, or just make plugins for all these software, that allow people to broadcast the songs that they are listening to and STREAM SHARE their songs. This would be less controversial since G+ is simply allowing one user to stream their media player song to another user like a radio, there is no file transfer and no piracy. This will certainly force people to stick to G+, it is a very small, simple but very important feature, letting your contacts know the kind of music you are listening to. If someone finds a really awesome track they just have to share it, and if they can do it on G+ they will stick to G+.

24) Companies are investing heavily in crowdsourcing and fansourcing nowadays. They want to know what ideas customers have and this is the reason why 1000s of mostly bogus crowdsourcing sites have sprung up. Many of these are good guys but they are investing in making software which will get obsolete soon. On the other hand people are freely discussing these things on SNS which is so valuable for these companies. Besides when someone is just casually chatting with their friends their opinions are likely to be more natural and genuine than when they sit in a focus group. So G+ needs to make software where spiders latch on to any interesting discussion happening about a product and intelligently re-formats the data and presents it to the respective manufacturer. The manufacturer pays G+ for the data which they normally buy from fansourcing sites and G+ then re-distributes the money received among those whose discussions were considered to be most valuable. Hence, people cannot actively discuss and then expect money. Google will take the data and sell it and then pay them. This will lead to much better market surveys and fansourcing.

25) G+ Adults Only stream – no no, not porn, but explicit humour like that of 4chan. People will be notified when some user is a 4chan user before adding them to their circle. Or people can go anonymous and temporary “sign out” so to say and use the 4chan app on G+. naaah this idea seems fail. The whole point of 4chan is anonymity. 4chan is important because some of the real lolcats and net pros hangout there, the hacker and programmer kinds, if they come to G+ it will bring in a huge user base.

26) Advertise QR codes of Athletes’ G+ profiles when they are shown on TV during the London Olympics 2012. So if I see a very impressive athlete, and their QR code flashes on the screen, I simply point my phone and get to their G+ profile where I quickly leave a congratulatory message. Done.

27) 2-5% Cash back for customers who do a review of the product a week after purchasing it using their G+ profile. G+ can give free genuine customer feedback to companies. Each product will be added with a special G+ Code. So for example I have purchased a particular brand of WiFi Router. The manufacturer has a G+ page and the bill/sticker on the product has the unique G+ Product Code or maybe even their regular bar code or QR code. I go to G+ and do a review of the product. Once the review is approved I get 2-5% of the cost sent to my G+ account. I can redeem it to my bank account or use it to buy stuff on Google Market. Google then aggregates all the data from the many reviewers and the additional discussions they had with their friends and family and sends it back in a proper format with statistics to the companies. This kind of true market research will actually cost the customer much less than sham marketing research companies who I know fake data.

28) Trending topics are shown on many sites most notably Yahoo. But what can one do with them apart from click on those terms and search? G+ will have open discussion rooms regardless of the circles, whenever anyone clicks on the trending topics, they join this, the world’s biggest chat room. But this chat room will be different all chat messages from 1000s of users won’t flood in at once, whenever someone sends a message and someone replies to them by using the @ or + prefix they visually get separated into a different chat box next to the standard chat box. This is same as when in a party you engage in a discussion with a few people then move on and meet few others. But all will be obviously be discussing the trending topic – Japan Earthquake, Osama Shot, etc.

29) Take the best app ideas from contests and make exclusive apps for G+ and G+ mobile app, these apps will be developed by Google itself and will not be available on any other platform iOS, Bada, Mac, Windows, Chrome, even Android Market. These apps will be exclusively be available for use on G+ when used through a browser or as add-ons on the G+ mobile app.

30) Tie up with a Rose delivery company i.e. a florist with global presence. Red for love, yellow for friendship etc. etc. instead of the laughable gifts that people send to each other on their birthdays and anniversaries on FB, G+ will instead send people actual Roses. So when I meet a Hot Girl and I want to impress her I am able to send her a Rose through G+ but apart from sending the virtual rose G+ will also get a real red rose delivered to the girl. There is a certain limit to how many roses a user can send, but basically the more active the user, the more +1s he/she gets, the more roses he/she is able to send.

31) G+ should have the Evolver (a 3D avatar making site) app for animated profile pic bots. Instead of a static profile pic or boring Yahoo Avatar, my Avatar can be a 3D model that looks just like me. I can put it as my profile pic or use it in my stream (which is seen by those who I share with) as an animation that I can completely control.

32) I for one would want to shift from FB to G+ just to “start afresh” my SNS experience. All that G+ needs to provide the many users who think like me (I’m sure there must be many who want to simply start again and build a better list of SNS contacts) is a simple reason to justify why G+ is better than FB, something that people who want to be fan boys of FB can be jealous of. No matter how many ideas I go through or how much I think, it all comes down to Gmail. If I can use Gmail right from the interface of G+ that is more than sufficient justification. Everything else that G+ can provide is a bonus.

33) On FB, everyone’s walls are the same. People don’t really visit others’ pages as such, they do go to others’ profiles but the page looks the same except the data changes. On FB people mostly stay on their own page and go through their feed and sometimes visit others’ profiles. On Twitter people mostly go to the pages of the people they are following and stay on their own feed sometimes. G+ needs to provide both equally. The feed is the same for everyone, only the data changes, but the “Wall” which Google can brand as “Place” should be customizable just like a website. A user can choose to allow people to graffiti on their Place, post pictures, videos, voice, text whatever. Everyone’s “Place” will be unique. With the added benefit of the Evolver 3D Avatars, groups of friends/contacts will be able to see their virtual selves hang-out at a common friend’s Place. So if I have an Filmmaker friend who has designed his Place to be a Movie Set, I am there along with 3-4 others, we are seeing 5 3D Evolver Avatars moving around the set, and now I make an action, I click on the virtual rack of DVDs and add The Shawshank Redemption, my Avatar goes to the rack and places a DVD of the movie. Whatever we chat can be done through voice, video or text. In voice my Avatar is moving its lips while my audio is being transmitted. In video my Avatar’s head is replaced by a video window from my webcam to roughly match the head. In text, there are speech bubbles over my Avatar displaying what I type. If no one is hanging out at the place, I am coming and leaving an “offline message”, the next time that friend checks into his Place, he will see the message with my Avatar coming and doing that action. This is basically a more interactive and fun Wall – A G+ Place.

34) I think G+ has used the +1 moniker to with the specific intention of becoming a discussion forum, also the +1 trend started in forums. Which is why they chose to allow strangers to share with you. You never know what topic would interest you, just glance between FB and G+, G+ appears to be more of a discussion forum with more text. Umm I’m not explaining it well at the moment, but in the last Part 1 contest I wrote a para that explained how G+ is going to become the world’s largest discussion forum. But what you have proposed is a very good alternative, if Google ever decides to kill G+ as an SNS. Which I won’t, can’t, doesn’t have to, battle lines are drawn, G+ will survive. Besides we have given enough fair ideas for G+ to tackle FB, so the question of retreating does not arise. In part 1 I had suggested, that I visit so many forums and on each the same vBulletin (a very expensive paid Forum software) is used and every place one has to register, check the activation mail, which seems pointless. I had suggested that G+ should bring all these forums into its fold, the vBulletin software simply gets its data re formatted into the common G+ layout, and every forum on the world is on G+. No need to register and log in on each. That is an idea that will definitely happen. vBulletin should be acquired by Google.

35) What’s up with the illegible captchas on YouTube? I hope the same kind of captchas are not used on G+, I have 20 20 vision and yet the success rate of captchas must be 30%, most of them cannot be read by any human let alone spam bot. Do the captcha companies make money by getting books digitized one word at a time or something? The FB captchas are amazingly easy to use. G+ should take that into consideration.

36) There is an absolutely need to allow at least basic Text Formatting like Bold, Underline, Italic apart from certain colours (maybe the Google brand colours alone). The plain text in the share box is not good. There needs to be some way to decorate it without making G+ look garish or gaudy.

37) Here is a nice profile pic app idea for G+ “Morphing Passport Size Portraits Profile Pic”. Users will be able to put GIFs as their profile pics which will show their own childhood-to-adult age pictures morphing and growing. For this to work, they will be required to submit a passport pic or a frontal head shot from any picture for every 2 years of their age. I can choose to submit starting from infant or teenage or whatever, basically 5-10 passport photos will have to be submitted, example one of my infancy, one when I was 2, one when I joined school, one when I was in middle school, one of high school, one of college, one of starting work, etc. etc. till present. The App will automatically make adjustments and morph the pictures into an animated GIF and upload it as my profile pic. This will be a unique feature that will attract people to G+. The GIF version would be proprietary meaning it would only work on G+ and not as a regular GIF that can be used on any site.

38) I have 3 FB profiles (1 real and 2 pseudonyms). The real name one is the one I have stopped using since the past year or so, because I really detest the kind of people I added onto it and it seems worthless to use now. The 2nd profile I created just to use the FB connect feature which is present on almost every site today so that I can save doing form filling and registering and confirmation links blah blah. But now I use that profile for writing careless comments on lulzy DamnLol pages. The third profile I created is for whatever serious purpose I want to use a FB account for without using my original and now stale profile. This feature of multiple IDs within a single ID was used by Yahoo even 10 years ago, but then people hardly saw any sense in using multiple IDs. Today with the proliferation of sharing having multiple IDs on a single site too is important. Both FB and G+ have launched circles that allows one to keep absolute control on who sees your shares but still, like me, I am sure there must be millions who just want to segregate their accounts and leave no room for error. G+ should allow an option for people who want to keep multiple profiles (1 real name, 1 fake name, 1 whatever, etc.) and whenever one clicks on +1 or uses G+ connect or Google Connect, then for those people with multi-IDs Google must display a quick selection box “select which profile you want to use for this site”. If I am commenting something risqué on DamnLol then I will obviously choose the fake profile. If I am trying to network with a possible business client I will use my real name option. If I just want to troll somebody I will use my 2nd fake profile which has 0 info on it – a blank slate. So instead of me making 3 separate G+ accounts I can make 3 profiles on my single G+ account. This feature is very necessary.

39) At the very least, Google can use its own Orkut to allow multi-posting, i.e. whatever you post on Orkut also shows up on G+ and vice versa. I am pretty sure FB and Twitter will gang up and Twitter is not going to join hands with G+. Both feel threatened by the new kid on the block. UPDATE: Plugins exists to report whatever you post on G+ onto FB and Twitter on Chrome Browser.

40) Google can use sponsorship ideas like “ReEnergiser” which will basically be a service that costs a lot of man-hours on part of Human Mods to Refresh Stale Brand, Business and Fan pages on G+. So Energizer Battery could sponsor it and it would be broadcast to everyone that Experts who people have to usually hire for huge amounts, will be provided for their pages for free at so and so time. This Energizer ReEnergiser is just one idea of the top off my head. Various acts by G+ which cost money and investment can be offloaded to Corporates and suitable brands for the Sponsorship.

41) When I see a great page that should be seen by a particular friend, or my boss, or my parent, absolutely positively, then there should be an option in the +1 button on that page that pops out a text field where I can type the first few letters of that person with whom I want to share. I should not be required to share it with my entire family if it is a page that I think my dad should see. There should be an option to share to just a single person, outside of G+, alongside the +1 button on sites. UPDATE: Duhh this option is present on G+, silly me

42) What is the common man’s indicator as to whether G+ is more popular or FB. It is the hit counter they see on the sites they visit, the numbers next to the FB thumbs-up and the number next to the G+ +1. How about Google make a conscious pro-active effort to identify the influencers, and ensure that the sites and pages where these influencers are most active show the G+ counter as almost near if not beating the FB counter. Once these influencers (hot chicks, jet setters, middle management, prodigies, popular guys and girls, funny people, etc.) start seeing that heyyyyy G+ is about to beat FB, they will insert the key and start the Bandwagon. And once the Bandwagon starts, the exponential growth will be unstoppable. At one point G+ would be able to go completely hand free and not require any proactive efforts to push their hit-counter for anyone. It will naturally start beating FB’s counter. That will be the day when G+ would have defeated FB.

43) Someone mentioned “flying view” and it lead to this idea: On the right hand side space of G+ which is mostly empty, put a Google Maps view. When I read a post from Vic Gundotara it will be hovering on a map of a city in USA. The map view will show lines connecting different places in the world all connecting back to the place of origin. So if a USA person shared and then it was shared by a Turkey person whose comment was read in India, it will show a parabolic line connecting USA to Turkey and Turkey to India. It will be view of the reach of that post. Just a nice gimmick. When I move to the next post , the map view on the right will also shift and a new point of Share origin will be shown, based on wherever that post originated.

UPDATE: Something similar to this exists: frog created A World of Tweets, a web-based visualization using HTML5 that shows a real-time global map of Twitter hot spots. Toggle between map and satellite views or watch in 3D!

44) TimeShift news feed: Google can make a time-machine but the best it can do in that direction is to show us news from whatever period we select present it as if we were in that time and the news was breaking out. So if I’m curious about what was happening around the end of WW2, I’d select that period and chronological historical events and news flashes including actual newspaper images and clippings will start flashing through my feed as if I was living in that time with this magical computer and G+. I can choose to run the news in real time or fast-forward.

45) People use “+1” all over the net in forums and discussions. They don’t click on anything but just type “+1”. What if G+ provides a plugin, that users can install, and whenever they type “+1” in a discussion thread it automatically +1s the post they like on G+. Easier than looking for a button and clicking on it. What this will lead to however is an explosion of shares on G+, there will simply be too much that people +1 and share. So if I am going through a friend’s profile and seeing all that he is +1 ing, I would get too many things. Which brings us to the 2nd and even more important idea which works superb even independently. The three levels of +1 ing viz +++1, ++1 and +1. Obviously +++1 means most urgent, top recommended and +1 means recommended. So when I am going through ha friend’s profile, I can choose whether to read his stream in +++1 mode or ++1 mode or +1 mode. +++1 will have the least, but most important and highly recommended shares while +1 will have the most even including regular shares. It is up to me to select which mode I want depending upon how much time I want to spend reading that friends posts/stream/profile.

46) Give an option called “Switch to G+ Limited-Options” and show an interface that is just like how people remember the old FB (before it decided to copy all of G+’s new features of circles, etc.). Meaning how FB used to be – your profile which was what everyone in your contact list saw, the same way, the way you saw your profile is what others also saw. This would be a nice mock on the limited scope and simplicity of FB, when G+ says here is a “feature limited version” of G+ and people will say hey this one is just like FB!

47) Paid-Sharing is already happening with Shweet.com, it is kinda detestable. Eventually friends and contacts who realise that their “friend” is simply sharing videos with them so he/she can get some points/prizes/gifts from Shweet they will remove him/her from their list. G+ should monetize popular posters in a different manner. They should not know when they might get money. It should not be such that people get sharing just to get money.

48) I just learnt that Slide owns Prizes.org and Google has given it freedom to operate independently, but why G+ integration and Google Connect are not available is beyond me.

49) Additional services that G+ launches such as the Celeb Only G+ Paparazzi and G+ Careers should not have instant registrations. You get to click on a “I’m Interested In Joining” button and once you do that and submit your email/G+ details you get a message saying your application is being reviewed and news will soon be provided. That way they will pine for it, rather than take it for granted.

50) The Chrome +1 button plugin exists, but just as a lofty goal let me state, one day G+ should become so indispensable that along with the regular Browser buttons such as Stop, Refresh, Back, Forward, +1 also becomes a compulsory part on every browser – whether Safari, Firefox, Chrome, or even FB’s own browser if it ever makes one.

Final Thoughts

Discarding G+ has just become fashionable and it will get out of fashion just as quickly. G+ has Google to support it. Everyone uses Google. When people begin to see people in your address book who have “+1s this” and “shared that” on G+ in your Google Search Results, they will slowly realise that G+ is indispensable.

The overall strategy for the 6 Billion should include a massive spending in philanthropy (giving low-cost G+ operational tablets to underprivileged bright students), apart from expanding an in-house team of master developers for apps and plugins for Chrome and G+. Android and G+ need to be pushed at the same time, once people are hooked on to Android Apps and those same are available on G+ for tablets/mobiles and desktop-browser-based surfing, it is going to be a force to be reckoned with. Advertising should be avoided as much as possible, but a short spurt of ads on TV might be beneficial provided they are done tastefully like the Chrome Fast campaign and focus on “speed”.

As the world moves towards another recession people are not reacting kindly to being told to fork out their money on an unlimited number of items on Facebook. There is simply too much consumerism. FB will soon be known as a brand network more than a social network, and when people get tired of being sold things, there won’t be any people left for brands to engage with. G+ must stay true to not allowing contests and brands to force users to “like” things for discounts they would generally give for free. G+ must allow brands to participate but not invade a user’s news stream. They need to stay on their brand pages and entice consumers to come towards them instead of pushing them. G+ must remain a place where one gets knowledge, entertainment, gets to discuss on every topic under the sun with like-minded people. The focus should be on “Free” and not “money, buy, discount, sale, blah blah blah”.

G+ should very seamlessly get transformed into an OS, the recently introduced drop down menus are meeting with both lovers and haters as every new step does, but most of those who are hating it use Windows and other menu-based systems. When they don’t need to use Windows for their software and applications and can do the same via a cloud using the much more cleaner interface of G+ (Chromium integrated) they would simply love it. Once Chrome books become widespread this transformation will increase exponentially.

The mobile social network is the future, beyond doubt, and G+ has Android, Google, Docs, Maps and FB has nothing. How many people really use an FB email? G+ should keep focussed on making the mobile app do everything that they need, everything that can be done on a Social Network while sitting on a comp. It is more private, you don’t look like a jobless fool when you use SNS on a mobile and GPS and location-based apps are about to revolutionise Social Networking. The nerds are already on G+ and they will stay there, the task before G+ is to make it “appear” easy for regular folks and not scare them with too many options.

New SNS players will come and go. Tumblr is trending currently. A while ago FourSquare was going to be the next big thing. Chatroulette died out as fast as it launched into superstardom. Google’s baby G+ has too strong a lineage to face a similar fate. The idea of G+ “dying out” just does not make common sense. It is not like Buzz or Wave or any other experiment Google might have done, it’s full-fledged and it can only go one way: Up.

According to the Nielsen Report, FB got 140 Million visitors in May 2011, thrice that of the number 2 – Blogger. With G+ around the blog-enthusiasts and bloggers will move to the G+ platform to both read as well as interact. The power of G+ is in the discussion board atmosphere, which is where the +1 term originated. People want to discuss online and not just make witty jokes and one-liners that is the norm on FB. On the other side, you are more likely to get more good jokes from those who have added you to your stream on G+. It will take care of both ends of the SNS need – fun as well as serious discussion.

As for as Advertising, it is but obvious that Web Video Ads will take-over TV Ads in the time to come. I have a revolutionary idea for changing the way advertising is paid for. Advertising should actually benefit the buyer more than the seller, to be true advertising. And with the this cluttered world where messages per day received by a person are continually increasing, the good brands with the good messages are unfairly losing out to big-budget ads from corrupt brands. Let’s not mince words, the one who advertises the most is not the best brands. In reality the one who advertises the heaviest and uses the biggest budgets is more likely to be the more evil corporate. Here’s what I propose, start by selling advertising space to advertisers and the advertising channel to the buyer. Meaning both the consumer and the company (the term advertiser will be abolished) will pay to show and see ads. The consumer will benefit by seeing only the ads he/she needs to see, and will see the best quality of advertising which is more entertainment than pure selling. They will see ads that they need to see, want to see, like to see. The company will be able to produce more targeted ads based on the stats G+ gives them of the kind of people who are paying to see their ads – which means customers who are ready to buy their products. Advertising, ideally, should simply be a conveyance of information, of truth, in an entertaining fashion, and not mind-manipulation or playing with emotions. Media management should simply be about deciding the right time and place to show the ads so there is less wastage of resources. When consumers choose the time, kind and manner in which they wish to receive information about the products they love and need, and are provided the same in a clean and entertaining manner, advertising will undergo a sea change. Slowly the company will be weaned off payments to show the ads and will only pay to make the ads. Thus the cost of seeing/showing ads will be borne entire by customers who want to see those ads. Like cable TV. You pay for channels you want to see. Thus you pay for information you want to receive. Customers will thus buy the information they need, and customise it to their comfort. Video Commercial will get more targeted and better produced.

DS, your mashable link confirms what the fact that most of us realise when out net is down “there is hardly anything to do without the internet, the computer becomes an useless machine”

People go online and do things because of links, one thing leads to another, short attention spans take their brains from one extreme to another, and they do work here and there along with a mix of whatever else interests them, it is better than a remote control. Hence when people have nothing to do, the net is the most obvious choice. Despite the ever increasing number of television channels, the bar on what is entertaining and worth your time has been raised so high thanks to YouTube, that TV just looks dull these days. The number of people watching shows online on pirated streaming as well as through iTunes and Netflix will continually rise, everyone hates advertising that simply kills the TV experience. TV is not interesting at all, it is to be resorted to when you are eating or too tired from long hours of computer use. And still people continue to be online even in front of the TV using smartphones, laptops and tablets, along with Internet TVs. It is safe to assume that cable TV will soon be dead.

I had mentioned an idea for the G+ Channel, well sure we need it now when billions are still on TV. But in 10 years the G+ TV Channel can safely go off air and on line. It is indeed an idea much more interesting that Twitter, a show that “shows” you how your favourite celebs use SNS instead of seeing their text on Twitter.

The pingdom link says females are more active on SNS than males and this fact is also confirmed in the Nielsen Report. Hmmm, we have always known that women are better communicators than men, so this should not be a surprising statistic. Slashdot, the geeky site, is obviously 84% male for a reason. Technology and gadgets predominantly Male Toys for the same reason that Cars and Bikes are. Faster, smarter, sleeker, men are more interested in power. But on all the rest the ratio is almost equal. Because most SNS sites have all kinds of info.

The third link of the FB stats is too much info and none of it pops out and makes an impression. The fourth link is what is the most interesting link of all. There are more males on G+ than females. Agreed to your point, we need to get the females here who will automatically attract more males to the site. But even without any stats to back-up, I’d like to make a sweeping generalisation and say that the average IQ of the current G+ male is much higher than the average IQ of those males who are on FB but not on G+. It just seems that G+ is bound to attract the inventors, the nerds, the geeks, the smarty pants ants, and general those who are justifiable Google fans. But you know what they say, the Nerds are the new Alpha Male. The new Alphas will bring on the girls, the ex-Alpha males will follow suit J. Indian, ahahahha, that report says “tech-savvy” Indian population, meaning geeks and nerds. It is true, though the average Indian maybe less tech-savvy than the average American, still the number of tech-savvy people in India must be much higher than those in USA (I’m guessing) simply because of the much higher population. China and Google are on a tricky path and the same reason that the Chinese authorities hate Google can be applied to FB too if too much activism and China-bashing by the Chinese begins to happen on FB. Thus ultimately, G+ will still remain the platform of choice for the discerning Chinese who wish to speak uninhibited.

Another interesting stat is that most G+ users are from the well-to-do class, not ultra-rich but not poor either. This is the class that really counts, it influences and reaches all others.

That 17% active users are slowly increasing, the basic reason is that most people did not get the concept of Circles right away despite the many intro videos. The pioneers came on G+ but their less-gifted friends are still on FB. But this 17% stat is slowly bound to increase. After initial use G+ grows on you, it is indeed much faster and simpler. You have more control on your profile, there is less bull, less ads, less brands and more discussions and even more lol.

When small and medium businesses start receiving customer leads because a customer found their phone number and offers from the G+ Pages these small and medium businesses will lead the charge in making G+ Pages the official business directory of the world. Name one company that does not want a unique icon on Google Maps. There is none. Except maybe….FB? J

Lulz, on the G+ page I added the following comment “Remember Women, Nerds are the new Alpha Males 🙂 We can order “sammiches” online 🙂 Lulz” +1 DS! J

Lastly, I managed to read some of the top voted entries which I had missed earlier (because of that bug on my PC that wasn’t opening some sites like blogger and Prizes). I read KP’s entry, smartly written, but I think it is much better to use circles than shout one message out to the whole world every time. You can use it just like old FB by using the public or all circles option, not much thinking required there. But I move his idea forward by saying, yes it is not okay to make a person think too much before posting an update or sharing something. So suppose I work in an ad agency, and play drums in a rock band, and have 10 girlfriends (oh I wish), etc. Then when I am posting something related to advertising, G+ can intelligently read what I am about to post and automatically suggest the advertising circles in the circles-box below the update, if I am talking about music or sharing a music video then my rock band circle automatically gets added, which I can remove or modify of course. If I am talking about going out and bragging about a new car or blah blah all those GFs need to be notified about what an Alpha Male I am and they get added in the circles box. So over time G+ can accurately predict which message is most suitable for which circle of mine, and also use stats on what kind of keywords are shared with my by those circles. Everything in Google has to do with Keywords – and there is no smarter thing in the world, distilling a whole idea down to one word. Everyone is worried about privacy, what better way to guard yourself than sharing various amounts of info with various groups! And ohhhh everyone is here for the prize money, Google’s not my uncle just something I happen to love, I am good at analysing things and coming up with valid improvements. And the $2500 is more than sufficient incentive to make me rack my brains and think of the BEST possible entry and ideas.

Prizes.org is a new website from Slide, a Google subsidiary, where people looking for help with a problem can utilize the time and effort of a whole crowd of people to provide them with the best solution they can think of.